Wanted: A Law for the Lazy.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 141, 22 March 1909, Page 4

Wanted: A Law for the Lazy.

Is laziness a disease? Is it increasing? Is there a remedy? Superintendents of caudal wards will answer each of these questions in the affirmative. Laziness'is the disease, they say, which produces DO per cent, of the great army of tramps an army almost large enough to garrison India It is a disease which is vastly on the increase if the number of ne'er-do-wells be any criterion. The remedy is, the same authorities say, forced labour in penal colonies. . It is too readily assumed by the general public that man a "on the road" must necessarily be looking for work. That is the last thing ninetynine out of every hundred think of, much less do. The professional tramp knows his busineses, which is to live upon those who work. That he does well. He has been discussed so frequently, and his vices have been so often paraded in the newspapers, that he has become a sort of celebrity—which brings him sympathy and money. Twenty-one years' experience of the working of an act designed to cure him of his roving lifejjoints to failure everywhere. . . . The crying need is a law for the cure of laziness, a law which shall give power to the authorities to detain the bully who lives upon the earnings of the weaker sex; the loafer who lives in public houses or upon the kerbstone outside; the tramp who frequents the same casual wards; the able-bodied pauper who will not work; and the budding gaolbird who has been nurtured upon truancy. That truancy is the outcome of laziness and the forerunner of crime is an established fact; thatwantof self-restraint, which is a virtue untaught at school, contribute*; very largely to the increasing tendency towards laziness, is admitted. And when the growth of truancy, the decline of moral teaching, and the shirking of parental responsibility are taken into consideration, we can hardly wonder that the growth of the army of laziness keeps pace.